I dreamed about an ex-girlfriend last night. Or rather, the ex-girlfriend, the one I had the longest relationship with before meeting and marrying Lisa. I don't remember the details much, but the gist of it amounted to her trying to insert herself back into my life--a repeat of something that happened around the time of my marriage.
I hadn't thought about her in ages, but in retrospect, last night's dream wasn't unexpected. You see, I just finished Julie Phillips' James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon at around midnight. To say it affected me would be an understatement. I've always had an inexplicable attraction for Tiptree's writings, and remember saving my pennies to buy that gorgeous Arkhan House edition of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever from Adventures in Crime & Space many moons ago. I'd heard vague talk of her being in the CIA, and killing her husband and herself in a suicide pact when they became old and decrepit. But Phillips' biography filled in a lot of the unspoken details, and cast the scenario in a very different light. You see, I dated James Tiptree, Jr.
Well, not really. Alice Sheldon was old enough to be my grandmother. But someone very much like her. The mania and depression were quite familiar to me from that long-ago relationship. My girlfriend at the time wasn't a writer or an artist type ala Tiptree, but she showed some of the same flighty, obsessive behavior of Sheldon in that she'd take up an interest in a potential career path, eat, drink and sleep it for extended periods, then burn out and start over with something different. She was also, like Sheldon, very dismissive of her own abilities and accomplishments, to the point where she'd withdraw from all of her classes midway through the semester with straight As across the board because the possibility existed that her "innate stupidity" would come through and she'd end up flunking. That kind of logic is maddening and frustrating in the worst kind of way, I can assure you.
But it's the suicide pact that got me, that really hit home. It's obvious in the book that Ting--Sheldon's 84-year-old husband--was in no hurry to die. Reading between the lines, it seems probable that Sheldon badgered him into agreeing to the suicide pact, and that when her depression deepened to a point where she finally wanted to end it, his desires were dismissed outright or rationalized away--she confessed to killing him in his sleep, after all, with no indication he supported this plan of action. This hit a little too close to home for me, because that tracked with the experiences I had with the ex as well.
I'd learned after dating her for a month or so that she'd been hospitalized about a year before for trying to kill herself (the details were always pretty vague). Once, while we were together, she'd tried overdosing on anti-depressants, which was certainly an unpleasant experience for all involved. She had a dog, a little border collie which she adored. It was a hyper, fun-loving thing, but I always knew when things were about to get Really Bad when the ex began casually mentioning how sad and depressed the dog had become, that the dog really wanted to be put to sleep. There are few things in life quite as surreally disconcerting as discussing the suicidal tendencies of a dog whose tail is whipping around at 90 wags per minute. Shortly thereafter, the talk would turn to making a suicide pact.
"Let's kill ourselves together, Jayme."
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't want to die."
Angry stare. "You're in denial."
Life went on like that for three years. I'd like to say that things got worse before they got better, but the reality is that they got worse before they got mind-numbingly awful. At the end of the affair, I'd abandoned my assigned role as the supportive martyr and was actively contributing to the toxic atmosphere, something I'm not proud of. It wasn't a healthy time for me, but I eventually got out with both my sanity and my life intact. It's frightening now to look back and see how very nearly things could've turned out to be Very Bad Indeed. We danced close to the precipice, but somehow never managed to go over the edge.
Sheldon did eventually go over the edge, taking her husband with her. That she staved it off for decades is a miracle unto itself, considering the nonexistent treatment available at the time for depression (which has only improved to mediocre in the intervening years). Was Tiptree's horrific, biting writing genius because of her mental illness, or despite it? The question is unanswerable, but I can't help repeating it over and over. Looking at her life from the opposite side of this skewed mirror, all I can think is "There but for the grace of God go I."
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